I am very pleased to announce the official release of Cassandra =
0.8.0.

If you haven't been paying attention to this release, this is your =
last
chance, because by this time tomorrow all your friends are going to =
be
raving, and you don't want to look silly.

So why am I resorting to hyperbole? Well, for one because this is =
the
release that debuts the Cassandra Query Language (CQL). In one =
fell
swoop Cassandra has become more than NoSQL, it's MoSQL.

Cassandra also has distributed counters now. With counters, you =
can
count stuff, and counting stuff rocks.

A kickass use-case for Cassandra is spanning data-centers for
fault-tolerance and locality, but doing so has always meant sending =
data
in the clear, or tunneling over a VPN. New for 0.8.0, encryption =
of
intranode traffic.

If you're not motivated to go upgrade your clusters right now, =
you're
either not easily impressed, or you're very lazy. If it's the =
latter,
would it help knowing that rolling upgrades between releases is now
supported? Yeah. You can upgrade your 0.7 cluster to 0.8 =
without
shutting it down.

You see what I mean? Then go read the release notes[1] to learn =
about
the full range of awesomeness, then grab a copy[2] and become a
(fashionably )early adopter.

Drivers for CQL are available in Python[3], Java[3], and Node.js[4].

As usual, a Debian package is available from the project's APT
repository[5].